Educators vs. students
By Onkar Ghate
web posted February 14, 2005
The educational tragedy in Rockford, Illinois, now making
national headlines, echoes a larger tragedy. At Lewis Lemon
elementary school, with a student body described by The New
York Times as "80 percent nonwhite and 85 percent poor," third
graders scored near the top in statewide readings tests. Their
results were bested only by students at a school for the gifted.
How were the results achieved? Teachers used reading lessons
"heavy on drilling and repetition, that emphasize phonics -- that
is, learning words by sounding them out." This approach,
however, is deemed too extreme by the new school
superintendent, who is phasing it out.
In discarding success, Rockford is following the demands of the
still-dominant voices in the nation's schools of education. They
insist that phonics instruction be balanced with its antipode, the
whole language "method." Because "reading is such a complex
and multifaceted activity," explains Dr. Catherine Snow,
professor of education at Harvard, "no single method is the
answer." This is like saying that because eating is "such a
complex and multifaceted activity," no single method can guide
us, and that a proper diet must therefore contain a mixture of
food and poison.
The controversy over how to teach reading is not a narrow,
technical dispute. It is a broad, philosophic disagreement, with
crucial educational implications. The phonics proponents
maintain that human knowledge is gained objectively, by
perceiving the facts of reality and by abstracting from those facts.
These proponents, therefore, teach the child directly and
systematically the basic facts -- the sounds that make up every
word -- from which the abstract knowledge of how to read can
be learned.
Supporters of whole language, by contrast, believe that the
acquisition of knowledge is a subjective process. Influenced by
John Dewey and his philosophy of Progressive education, they
believe that the child must be encouraged to follow his feelings
irrespective of the facts, and to have his arbitrary "opinions"
regarded as valid. On this premise, the child is told to treat the
"whole word" as a primary, and to draw his conclusions without
the necessity of learning the underlying facts. He is taught this --
in spite of the overwhelming evidence, in theory and in practice,
that phonics instruction works and whole language does not.
In learning to speak, a child has already performed a tremendous
cognitive feat. To read, he must now grasp the connection
between the black marks he sees on paper -- which to him are
like hieroglyphs -- and the spoken words he already
understands. Systematic phonics instruction teaches a child to
break the code of written language.
Spoken language is made up of discreet units of sound, called
phonemes, like the b sound in "bat" or "boy." Phonics teaches a
child to break down spoken words into their phonemes and to
symbolize them by written letters. The child learns how to sound
out each word through its component letters. Reducing reading
to a manageable set of rules quickly enables a child to read
almost any word -- and to experience reading as something easy
and pleasurable and mind-opening.
This is what supporters of whole language condemn as
"constraining" and "uncreative." Analyzing language by abstract
rules that connect phonemes to letters, one of them says
dismissively, imposes "an uptight, must-be-right model of
literacy."
Instead, they argue that the child ought to focus on an entire
written word, like "hospital" or "boomerang," and learn it as the
teacher pronounces it. Having no method to reduce the tens of
thousands of written words to a manageable set of rules,
however, the child must treat each word as a unique symbol to
be memorized -- an impossible feat.
What is the child to do when he encounters a word he has not
yet memorized? He must guess. Here is what some whole-
language advocates suggest the child do: "Look at the pictures"
(what if the book does not contain pictures?); "Ask a friend" (is
reading not a solitary activity?); "Look for patterns" (why not
systematically teach him "patterns," that is, phonics?); "Substitute
another word" (is this teaching?). Conspicuously absent is: "Look
in a dictionary" -- because the child crippled by whole language
cannot read a dictionary.
Whatever twisted mental processes the child is supposed to go
through, it is a linguistic corruption to call this a method of
reading.
The use of whole language results in nothing but illiteracy.
(California, for example, which tried this approach in the late
‘80s, abandoned it after reading scores plummeted.) The
seeming "successes" of whole language occur only when phonics
is smuggled in -- that is, when the child (on his own or with the
help of teachers or parents) secretly decodes written language by
discovering that, say, the words "banana," "boat" and "box,"
which he has memorized, have a similar initial sound and begin
with the same letter.
What our schools need is not "moderation," but phonics
instruction. We would consider it child abuse to add
contaminated food to a child's diet for the sake of "balance." We
should consider it the same when educators add whole language
to reading instruction.
Onkar Ghate, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a resident fellow at the Ayn
Rand Institute (www.AynRand.org) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute
promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand -- best-selling author of Atlas
Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy
she called "Objectivism."
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com